Summit aims to boost college chances for underprivileged

University of California President Janet Napolitano spoke as a panelist about supporting disadvantaged students at a White House summit on Thursday attended by President Barack Obama, first lady Michelle Obama and more than 100 higher education leaders.

The event was the first gathering of this size for higher education advocates at the White House. It emphasized expanding college opportunities to low-income students.

Obama asked university and college presidents, advocacy groups and private sector members who attended the summit to make commitments to implement new strategies centered on improving access and outcomes for underserved students.

“(The White House summit) puts higher (education) on a national platform, and I think we’ve suffered from not having a national expectation about higher education – about accessibility, affordability, excellence,” Napolitano said during her panel discussion about low-income student enrollment.

The UC pledged to carry out new plans that involve providing more counseling and student support services to equilize opportunities in the University for both current and future students.

One of the initiatives involves collaboration with the California State University and California Community Colleges to boost transfer opportunities and college awareness for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, Napolitano said during the panel discussion.

The UC Office of the President, along with other state higher education systems, plans to develop an interactive, electronic system to provide personalized information regarding degree preparation and transfer pathways, according to a statement from UCOP.

The University will also embark on a partnership with the College Board, an association best known for administering the SAT, the most commonly used college admissions standardized test, Napolitano said.

Data collected by the College Board shows that disadvantaged students who perform well on the Preliminary SAT often do not take the subsequent SAT exam or apply to college, said David Coleman, president of the College Board, who also spoke as a panelist.

The UC plans to work with the College Board to identify these students and pursue “aggressive” outreach using strategies such as broad-based mailing of college admission-related information, Napolitano said. The College Board will also automatically mail four college application fee waivers to all students who are income-eligible along with their SAT test scores, which should encourage students to consider higher education as an attainable goal.

The inability to navigate the complexity of the college application system deters many socioeconomically underprivileged students from applying, said Bridget Terry Long, a professor of education and economics and the academic dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who was a panelist at the summit.

“We have to be proactive with outreach,” Long said. “To get students through the pipeline from (high school) to college, (students) need the right information at the right time.”

Higher education appears to be an enduring policy area of interest for the Obama administration. The president has undertaken other projects regarding higher education, and he is expected to discuss them during his upcoming State of the Union Address on Jan. 28.

“Everybody here is participating … because you know that college graduation has never been more valuable than it is today,” Obama said during his speech.

Michelle Obama also recently began a new initiative to increase the number of low-income students who pursue and receive college degrees.

The summit was intended to help propel movement toward greater educational equity forward by engaging leadership in the higher education sector, “even absent new legislation,” said Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council, during his opening remarks.

President Obama echoed a goal initially stated in his first joint address to Congress in 2009: to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020.